We just got our 100% usage email last night. On logging into the Telstra usage meter we've found that none of the downloads from the recent Steam sales have been unmetered. I'm quite positive the data came from the Telstra Steam Content Server as for one the games came down at 1.7MB/s (about what our 15mbit connection can muster) and two when you click play, you see a little banner that says content delivered by: Telstra Unmetered.

Has anyone else noticed this? I'm going to give them a call today, but I expect they'll just say there are no guarantees that you will connect to the Telstra server and we'll be forced to pay the overage.

I had previously read (on the Steam forums I believe) that the banner you see when you click play shows which content server you're connected to. According to Ragnor it does not. The other thing that made me believe I was connected to Telstra is that I'd never got even close to 1.7MB/s on Steam before, in fact I usually set my content server to USA because anywhere in NZ got me sub 250KB/s.

We called Telstra, they gave us a credit for a certain amount of overage this month.

Yes but they make that perfectly clear on their webpage and it's not their fault, it's a limitation of the Steam client.

I've had TCPView running while downloading off Steam to check that it's downloading from the correct server, the banner showed TelstraClear yet traffic was coming from both the TelstraClear server and a server with a US IP address.

As has been mentioned you need to use third party tools to force your steam client to only use the relevant ISP (in this case TelstraClear) steam cache. This is a steam issue, not a TelstraClear one. It's not terribly hard to add the relevant Windows Firewall rule manually rather than using external tools thou.

The other issue is that some (mostly newer) steam content is now distributed via HTTP, and this completely bypasses ANY steam cache content servers. You have no way to tell tell what method steam is using, and again this is very much a valve/steam issue.

Information wants to be free. The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

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